


Heart Like A Grave

by heli0s



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky is falling apart, Dark, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gore, HYDRA Past, Memory Loss, Psychological Horror, Trauma, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, sacrilegious themes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2020-12-15 00:54:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21025082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heli0s/pseuds/heli0s
Summary: Sometimes the world of the living gets mixed up with the world of the dead.Following a string of mutilations across the United States, Bucky remembers a face he should have never forgotten.





	1. Heart Like A Grave

It’s spooky.

The mission is strange and settles inside his stomach like a large pill, leaving a dry stretch of his throat in its wake. Repeatedly, the muscles of his esophagus involuntarily flex to wash the lingering away. Autumn always does this to him—the orange and rusted world outside reminding him of what’s soon to come.

That terrible gnawed hand in the night, seizing his ankles and dragging him clawing from the warmth of his bed into the shade of his nightmares. Every dried leaf dropping languidly in the breeze drives him further away from himself and back into the _plunk plunk plunk_ of rainwater dripping from corroded pipes. Back into the cement cellblock crawling with mold and the smell of stale sweat. Back into the capsule where the liquid nitrogen severs his breath from his lungs.

He hadn’t been lying when he told Stark that he remembers all of them.

He does.

He remembers every face sunken in by the bullets from his rifle or the sharp plates of his metal hand, every chest cavity split open, every drop of blood splattered onto the toe of his boot. He knows each final throe of death as if it’s his own heartbeat—that putrid and vile thing alive inside his chest, thumping out a reminder of his penance.

They come to haunt him in the cold.

Bucky and Steve have been following a series of murders across the United States for months, starting in sunny California at mid-summer when the breeze was still warm and picks up that salty spray from the Pacific.

Bucky had nursed the shoreline like a child weeks before on an unrelated assignment. Gazed at it with longing, let the wind caress his face like a lover. It was his first time there and he wished he could have stayed where it is temperate and warm forever… but the deaths take him forward, following Steve diligently over four more states and six more bodies all twisted in the same configuration.

The first time he saw it, he thought he might vomit. The smell came before the sight, but that’s not to say the sight wasn’t horrific. Steve hissed loudly and looked away and bared his teeth.

“Fuckin’ hell.”

Bucky recognized the sallow face, drained of color and expression, but still—the sharp tip of the nose and the scar on the forehead were familiar enough.

Bucky had given it to him, after all.

Voronin, Maksim. An old handler he had in the sixties, eyeless and kneeling on the concrete floor in supplication. Voronin’s limp head was tilted upwards, hair smoothed away from his face, leaning into the sun pouring from the hole in the roof of the ramshackle house.

There had been no urgency in his death. The light falling over his features was an ironic statement made by an attentive hand. His ribs were snapped from his spine, lungs stretched through the opening to flop pitifully down his back over the flaps of thick skin. Blood eagle. A barbaric method assembled with care.

Voronin’s chest gleamed the dripping red word _nineteen_.

The first chill had raced up Bucky’s spine and scurried into his head like a million spiders.

They followed the mutilations to six more bodies and six more words. Each time, Steve watched Bucky shudder harder in the disappearing summer breeze, wither away quicker with every pair of lungs stretched apart, and every word finger-painted on a new chest.

_Seven. Father. Tidal. Relic. Marrow. Four_.

The bodies were altered further each time, played with like dolls by a curious or cruel child. Some had their hair cut off haphazardly- tufts fallen to be caught in the sticky netting of mucus membrane and blood. Others had broken fingers, bent back and forth like snap circuits. The worst one, so far, had been the gaping maw of Isidor Utkin, jaw shattered, teeth pulled out only to be hammered back into his skull-- a calcium crown, metal fillings like polished moonstone.

No matter how waxen and grey their skin becomes, or how sloughed-off and maggot-chewed it may be, Bucky remembers them, too.

All of them.

Jeering and leering faces throughout the decades, indifferently watching him remain ageless while they passed on with time. Each new-old wrenched open mouth and peeled back eyelid nudges him further down, and he feels himself falling into something deeply terrifying and familiar.

Bucky sleeps less, slipping out of the reach of that claw in the night. He walks like the dead, stumbling in the breeze and dragging his feet.

The spiders weave their webs and lay their eggs, spooling threads to lead him into the dark.

Outside the door of the seventh house, Bucky finally remembers the one he forgot.

_Nineteen_. _Seven_. _Four_. It thumps around his troubled head, knocking to be let in from the cold snow-white tips of Russian mountaintops. _Nineteen. Seven. Four_.

Endless space gazes at him when he peers through the peephole in his memory. Back and forth, he scans the fisheye lens, tracing the way the room warps and bends, but finding nothing that makes sense. Like a dream too far out of his reach in the morning, he can only vaguely feel around for it until it is ready to pull the blindfold from his eyes.

A scent. A sound. An image.

It had been so fuzzy and far away, but as the door opens, the mirage becomes fully recognized in the midnight room.

The metallic flavor of copper in his nose. A sweet humming from a raspy voice. An outline.

The dream returns to him in a rush of her figure.

Hard angles. Soft curves. A pink tongue tip brushing over a protruding bottom lip. She stands at work over the wheezing and heaving body, a hooked needle through the squelching muscle of its lung. A shimmer of moonbeam reflects the fishing wire attached to her hand as she tugs the line through.

It whips and the whistle crawls into his ears.

She is blood-soaked and smiling at him like he’s finally come home.

“_Soldat_.” She greets cheerily, fingers continuing their craft, “Remember him?”

Bucky’s throat clenches again, pushes that terrible pill down when it gets stuck in the past. Of course, he remembers the man who activated him in 1991, who tasked him with intercepting the serum, who oversaw the creation of more monsters just like him. Monsters like her, too.

She doesn’t look a day older than twenty-six. But he doesn’t know anymore, how old she looks or how old she actually is. Time has become a looped circle, broken and folded over on itself—useless to them both.

She wraps the wire around her bare fist in coils, tugs it with a hard yank and it digs into the clenched-tight flesh of her, coated in iron.

Frozen, he stands as she moves over to a discarded dining chair, steps on it and the table it belongs to, and knots the wire around the ceiling fan’s fixture. His eyes fearfully travel down the slanted line, back to where it is stitched into organ and shredded skin suspended tautly in the air.

Soaked marionette pieces hanging like ornaments for her pleasure. Six garish wings, dripping. Karpov’s chest reads _kyrie _and he hacks one final splash of blood. Her former name oozes from his lips.

_Seraph._

Seraph. That complicated creature who used to be a girl.

Seraph. That wraith who plagued him.

Seraph. That angel who blessed him.

How did he forget her in the first place?

—

She can’t be older than sixteen when they drag her into the concrete room. The Soldier stands with squared shoulders, fingers clenched tightly as they throw her onto her knees.

Just a girl.

A tiny, fragile thing made from fishbones and see-through smooth child-skin. Big, frightened eyes, spider leg lashes framing the glassy reflection of him against her pulsating sclera. She looks like the way a paper doily might if it were a person—delicate, brittle, made to tear.

He’s been conditioning the new experiments for days, fracturing ribs and puncturing flesh, leaving them raw and open and light years past their limits. Even before they get to him, they’ve already gone through the gauntlet of Hydra’s desensitization. They’ve been lashed and humiliated and torn to bits until they forget they’re human. After their minds break, he breaks their bodies, too. Then, they continue down the assembly line where it circles back around until their handlers decide it’s enough.

She’s not quite there yet. She’s still afraid, which means he’ll see her again at least two more times before she’s sent away on her first assignment. The Soldier doesn’t remember when he was human last, and he doesn’t feel either way about it, other than slightly satisfied that his knees aren’t weeping blood.

Against the wall, her handler laughs, throwing a lighter to Karpov who sucks in the sizzling cherry tip of his cigarette.

“They call her Seraph--- youngest of the Soldiers. A baby! I had her crawl on her knees today.”

He slaps his knee gleefully and spits on the floor, the spatter of mucus dully reflecting under the single hanging bulb. “Zola thinks she will lead us into the promised land.” Another splatter lands disparagingly by the girl’s foot as Karpov snickers.

“Isn’t that horseshit?”

\--

Steve returns from exploring the perimeter, barely able to push the door open with a half-spoken phrase before her gun is trained on him. Bucky sucks in a breath, holds his hands out to alleviate the tension. “Stop.”

He doesn’t know if he’s pleading her or Steve, but he’s half a second too late and Steve’s shield is launched across the room in a blur. Bucky knows her. Bucky knows she is faster because she has already sprung up into the air, twisting backwards and slamming both feet firmly down on the dome of Captain America’s defense.

It clatters to the floor with her perched above it, red palm smearing a five-fingered symbol on the pristine white.

“Tell your friend I’ll give his toy back if he asks nicely.” Not a breath or a hair out of place, both devilish and demure at the same time.

“Don’t.” Bucky warns shakily, but she is brash and hardened, cold like the capsule they both know so well.

From her crouched and balanced position, she moves her pistol from Steve to Bucky in a slow semi-circle, left hand reaching up to support her wrist. “He might not care if I shoot him, but he’ll care if I shoot you. Tell him to stand down.”

Steve snarls like a wild animal, ego flaring to retaliate.

“I’ve shot you before, _Soldat_. I’ll shoot you again. Tell him to _stand down_.” And then, a warning is fired. It ricochets off his metal arm, backwards over Steve’s ear and pings off the wall behind him. When he moves too late, she fires another one and it rips through his side.

\--

They’ve shaved her head and the nicks from where the razor was too clumsily handled scab over into jagged lines. On both of her wrists are purple hand-shaped bruises, blooming fingertips wrapped all the way back around to her pulse point.

They make her fight the others and keep time. With every injury they eliminate five seconds from the watch and shoot at her bare feet when she stops to catch her breath. The blood in her mouth drips down her chest and thighs and he can tell from the way she is breathing that her ribs are cracked.

Her first mission had been a failure. This is the punishment. Make her stronger, faster, better because Zola commands it and he doesn’t care how the task gets done.

“Your turn, Soldat. Show her.”

She’s barely a hundred pounds and when he pins her against the wall, she raises her chin to look at him. Inside the pupils of her wet eyes twinkles the grey light of a million dying stars.

—

“Buck?”

Steve is by the door, shield in hand, precariously hanging onto its rim with his fingertips. “You okay?”

His eyes flash from the gore and then back to Bucky where the fishing line is pulled tightly around his forearm. One of the wings on Karpov’s back hangs against his muscle and sinew. Steve examines the word on his chest and then fixes his attention back on Bucky, calls his name to no avail.

Bucky blinks, whirls to the dining table where she had been seconds ago. Gone. No pistol aimed at him. No shield beneath bloodied boots. No hungry curl of her lips. Gone.

But there is the faint scent of bitter gunpowder and rose petals in his nose—saccharine, dusted with burnt ether.

He pats himself down, squeezing the side of where she’d shot through, checks for injury but the only blood he finds is from the wire. The searing pain from her bullet has disappeared and only a ghostly tickle remains, like a loose thread from his shirt brushing against him.

“What?” He asks into the air.

Steve narrows his eyes cautiously and grips his shield a little tighter.

“Who were you talking to?”

Bucky doesn’t know. He thought he was talking to _her_. He rolls the sticky line in his palm and blinks the afterimage of her smile away. The whistling in his brain erupts into a million screeching baby spiders, breaking out to feast on the memory of his old pupil.

—

The girl has changed.

They ride to Volgograd together where he carefully watches the back of her head. Occasionally she leans back to look at him with her lips puckered in a displeased grimace. She’s almost twenty, plump still in places, sleek and thin in others—sharp jawline with the round cheeks of a child nearly grown into a woman.

She’s built now like she should— four years of bone crushing training have molded her into a steel blade, saturated with power. Her gait. Her posture. Even the way she lands and receives blows or levels the scope to her eye and pulls the trigger-- she matches him pound for pound.

He taught her those things, after all.

She is Zola’s favorite toy soldier, strapped head to toe in neoprene and weaponry. A pistol on her thigh, two on her back, serrated blades flanking them top and bottom—her favorites. Her boot tip hides a dagger he’s seen her exercise many times.

She sits in the silence, drumming a beat with smashed purple fingertips. Absently, she peels one barely-there nail off and it squelches sickeningly, dried over and scabby. She flings it across the car where it lands on the floor and fades into the black.

When the sun sets, she turns quietly and looks at his mouth. Then she turns back around.

In the former Stalingrad, they play fake aristocrat. They stay in a splendorous room overlooking the river where the faint brine of sewage wafts in through the balcony. Even the night blooms aren’t enough to keep it at bay, so he shuts the door and lock them inside where they can breathe. The crystal chandelier swings precariously with the closing glass.

They are here to assassinate an American politician-- Clark Lister and his wife. Children, too, if they’re unlucky enough.

She undresses in the middle of the room, strips down to her underclothes and wordlessly makes him zip her up. She secures a thin stiletto to her thigh and scoops her hair up with silver pins. He watches her slip on silk gloves and then hooks his arm through her bent elbow.

She freezes and glares up into his eyes. “What are you doing?”

“Our mission. We are married. The table will be set for a couple. Play the part, Seraph.”

She looks more like his daughter, but this crowd wouldn’t bat an eye.

He leads her down the velvet carpeted staircase where she reflexively continues to jerk her arm away in small movements. He places his other hand over hers in a falsely loving stroke. It keeps her still, but he knows she is seething. She hates being touched, and she hates him the most.

They sit at the table lit by candles and a fragrant floral arrangement. Orchid and crocus petals sprout from the shimmering vase, sprinkling the cloth in sweetness and spice. Lister and his wife are on the opposite side, smiling widely, and engage them in conversation.

The Soldier laughs at something Lister says—a joke she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t know if it’s a genuine laugh or if he’s just very good at faking, but her eyes snap up to his in surprise to hear the sound. Lister’s wife compliments her dress, asks her for the name of the doctor who did her nose. She doesn’t understand that either, but the wife titters anyway, places a hand on the back of her neck. Calls her _darling._ Says she’d love to have a friend _just like this_. Cherub-faced and youthful. 

The Soldier understands cues. He leads her along when Lister and his wife make their exit.

\--

That night, Bucky changes for bed in the shared motel room when Steve showers. He tugs off his shirt by the round collar and freezes when he catches sight of it in the mirror.

A newly raised and puckered hole—a sun-shaped scar on the hard plane of his abdomen where a bullet has gone through and exited the other side. But somehow, he still feels it— burrowed in there, slicing through his muscles and stuck where it doesn’t belong.

“Steve?” Bucky calls as the water ceases, “Steve?” A little more panicked now. “Steve!”

From the bathroom door, billowing clouds of steam rise and scatter, soaking his nostrils in vapor. Peppery sage and minty pine notes of eucalyptus that is supposed to calm and soothe but now suddenly sticks inside of his airways like paste—tinged with the fetid odor of graveyard dirt. Mealworms crawl over his eyes. Steve’s shadow is large and engulfs the room, burying him.

“Woah!” Steve cries when Bucky rocks into the dresser with his bare back. “What?” His hand is outstretched, as if he could reach across the room and grab Bucky from where it is his mind is taking him. “What is it?”

Slowly, unsteadily, Bucky’s finger traces the air down to his stomach where the scar has formed. “What is this?” He asks in a whisper, because saying it any louder would make it true.

Steve sends him that look again—the one that makes him question his reality and signals the screeching back into his brain.

It’s the tilting of Steve’s head, the narrowing of his eyes, slight flare of his nostrils before he warily confirms, “Buck. You’ve had that since we found you.”

\--

Her handler is pleased. He marks the mission report with notes and asterisks. Seraph, the youngest of them, face like an angel, just like her namesake. It’s perfect.

They are paired on another of the same kind. The Soldier becomes her instructor once again until she falls into step with the ebb and flow of a seduction. He teaches her how to dance, how to sway and move like flowing water across rooms, how to grin and bear it until she finds the eyes of men and women before guiding them into dark hallways.

Even though she burns red, stutters, and trips on her own feet; the marks either never notice or they only think it is a part of the game. She only moves naturally again after they’re dead.

“Good.”

Another diplomat is shot, gun muzzle pressed against a goose-feather red and gold brocade pillow in his room, pants pulled down to his knees. She staggers off the bed and shudders all over, yanking her own clothes back on with a scowl.

When her zipper gets caught on a torn piece of fabric, he swats her clenched hands away and pinches the silk together between his forefinger and thumb.

“Stay still.” He commands as he slides the clasp up the row of metal teeth, knuckles brushing against her spine while he holds the hem together. Goosebumps break out on her shoulders and arms and she lurches away from him, eyes downcast.

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t realize that the round cheeks of her doll face and big, wondering eyes strike right into the hearts of them. Her button nose, bee-stung lips, lashes like fringed curtains. Even her scent, crushed rose, how it seeps out from her very skin is a mystery.

The Soldier watches her with a caustic smile, embittered by what _he_ knows.

They haven’t sold her to the highest bidder, like he’s been. And she would never be because she is Zola’s chosen puppet and he keeps her safely behind the bulletproof glass of a bell jar, in unspoiled and immaculate condition. Even if Zola is nothing more than a disembodied and static-laced voice, his influence is a vice-grip.

Nobody touches her. Nobody ever will.

“Be grateful you’re doing this and not other things.” The Soldier states plainly, and the split second of terror in her eyes is enough of a response.

\--

October sees the slow browning of leaves, peppered into the clinging greenery. The hand of autumn brushes its fingertips down the United States, nails scratching along his back like a specter with each passing day, leaving frost in its wake.

He falls asleep in the car while Steve drives them back up into Jersey, slipping away at the industrial backdrop of power plants and construction—piles of gravel and pebbles like sand dunes reaching into the sky. Over the jackhammers and honking of a hundred intolerant cars, music plays in the background-- a quiet choral vocalizing, an organ bellowing whale song lullabies.

\--

The record players scratches when she rips the needle off.

Another hotel. Another mark. Another death and her dress half-off in disarray. She’s black-eyed and seething. This is their eighth mission together and instead of poisoning the mark like she was told, she rammed her fist into his face until it went all the way through.

Up her arm runs splashes of red like a torn glove.

When he reaches over to zip her back up, she slaps his hand away. “Don’t touch me.” Then she pushes him into the wall, “Fuck you.”

A brat under the veil of an angel. A child under the face of a killer. Twenty-two now, she’s been awake longer than he, catching up to him slowly in age. It makes him a little jealous that they let her witness the passing of time, but the perks don’t come freely.

She does this on her own, without his supervision, railing against it with uncontrolled tantrums and blundered missions. It’s why they’ve activated him three years later, to reign her in like he’s always done.

He tells her Zola won’t always be around to protect her, but she tells him to fuck off, wielding her words like artillery.

Her eyes flash as he watches her change masks, face tilted up to roam over his, lingering on his jaw and mouth, counting his eyelashes and the blue behind them. She breathes onto his collar, tip of her nose grazing his chin resentfully. “Is this what you all want?”

“Seraph. Stop.”

“Why? Andrey does this to me on purpose— to humiliate me. Put me with you, make you my handler in the field. They must think something of us. I _know_ what they make _you_ do.”

He snarls, catches her throat in his palm, stomach twisting acid and bile at the mention of it, “I said, _stop_.”

Her face turns red with the clenching of his hand. His flesh one is enough to snap her neck, but she starts to laugh, choked little gasps as her feet dangle off the ground. “Go ahead. Kill their little Seraph. _Try_.”

For a split second she looks pleased, feet sliding up his shins.

“_Ma’am_,” she suddenly sings, licking her lips and grinning wolfishly and for a second he sees himself in her upturned features. “How would you like me? On my knees? Gagging you?”

Her left-hand clamps over his wrist and she cracks her knuckles in his face—a taunt. “You paid for The Fist of Hydra, after all; I’ll do whatever you like.”

He releases her with a roar, reeling back wrathfully. She folds onto the ground and clenches her fists. Her long hair curtains her face, covers her cheeks and eyes. Her shoulders shake with laughter and in his nose is the smell of roses in bloom. Fresh blood and snowfall. Sweat and the piercing perfume of rot.

She laughs and laughs, and he takes a step away.

When she looks up and the hair falls from her face, he sees her skin peeling from her face like strips of papier-mache. Her teeth fall into her hands. Moths erupt from her chest.

—

Bucky can’t remember what time the car stopped or how he got from it to the bed. Steve is nowhere to be found when he wakes up drenched under the sheets in darkness. The flapping curtain draws his attention to the window where it is open to the night outside. Crickets chirp. Cars whiz by across the street. People chatter and guzzle beer in the parking lot.

It’s freezing and he slams the glass pane shut before burrowing back under the covers.

His hand traces the ridge of that scar, reading the tiny hills and valleys of it like a secret message in braille. He wants to remember it, but it’s locked away. The phone rings and the vibration of it beneath his pillow makes him jump.

Steve is on the other line.

“Hey Buck, there’s food in the fridge. I’m rendezvousing with Natasha, but it shouldn’t take long.”

There’s a crackle of static and the sound of Bucky’s name in the background. “What?”

“What?” Steve parrots back.

“Thought she said something. Romanoff.”

“What? I’m— I’m still driving. I’m not there yet. Hey…”

He doesn’t want to hear this again. Not right now. Not ever. That concern marring Steve Rogers’ voice returns like clockwork. It’s always the same.

“You okay?”

He hangs up after an exhausted sigh, reassuring Steve that yes, he is fine. He’s just tired. The deaths are a little too close to the vest but there’s nothing wrong with him other than the developing scoliosis from time spent too long in a car.

At that, Steve laughs, says goodbye, and leaves him once again in the blue-black of their motel room. He groans, leans back into the pillow that crinkles noisily into his ears, tries to ignore the smell of dusty motel sheets and falls back into a hole from 1999.

—

It’s the new millennium and the Sydney Opera House has been closed off to the public for five miles in every direction. Swarming bodies still edge their way inside, tickets in hand— exchanged for at least a couple thousand. It’s disgusting and decadent and The Soldier is tasked very specifically tonight.

She is twenty-six and covered in a sheer dress flecked with rhinestones, fitted like it’s her own skin, leaving nothing to the imagination but her guts. She is the epitome of opulence with her curled hair pulled back by two small braids, glitter dusting her collarbones and lips-- simulated innocence to adorn the shape of a woman’s body. She is garlanded in jewels, walking mindlessly beside him, catching the eye of anyone close by.

Zola’s influence is gone. His favorite toy soldier has been reduced to a simple toy for the past two years. Girl flesh, plump-lipped, compliant and dead inside. Perfect to be passed around like a cigar in the meaty hands of rich old men.

Inside the purple velvet room is a stage where he leads her to stand under the spotlight. She turns slowly, letting the beam sparkle off her dress in a million kaleidoscopic rays, eyes fixed forward lazily. The only thing he watches for are their numbers through the swelling cigarette smoke, filling the room like a fog machine. Two million and the placards still rise.

This is how Hydra sustains itself and it reminds him that corruption isn’t always as obtuse as secret organizations breeding assassins. It is also actors and business-owners, old-money socialites and scum dressed up in the limelight, all the while crawling on their bellies in the shadows.

He collects the money afterwards, stands in the corner of the room when the winner takes her into bed.

She’s been programmed to respond differently this time, and the customers have acknowledged that the purchase comes with a risk, a rulebook, and an observer. She’s been scrubbed too many times and the consequences are apparent; the last man who put his hand on her neck lost the entire hand and she broke a canine chewing through his bones.

Hydra had fixed her. The Soldier buried the body. No one is allowed to do anything but crawl on top and be silent. They still pay because having the wicked Seraph docile has beneath them is too good to pass up.

When the man presses her into the silk sheets, she trembles and wails. “D-Daddy? Daddy?”

“What the fuck is this?” He yells behind him into the dark corner where The Soldier observes vacantly, “I thought you fucking idiots wiped her! I didn’t ask for a goddamn kink package.”

And then she begins to laugh, “It’s so fucking small. It’s so—” a shriek of delight, “Tiny! A little worm!”

“Wait it out.” The Soldier commands to the reddening, freckled back, incensed by her insult. “It’ll pass.”

But her laughter continues, and her hands fly to her eyes to wipe the tears streaming out, “Daddy, please don’t hurt me anymore.”

Her accent turns Russian and thick, slurred and heavy consonant blends.

“Think you can wipe me?” Her hand grips the fat throat before it can say anything else. The skin slides between the spaces of her fingers as he chokes. “The body keeps the score. I will come back.”

Naked and rising, she sits up, jostles the man off her chest, all two hundred pounds of him reduced to wobbly pink flesh—like a slab of raw ham. She looks over at The Soldier with a bashful smile, “Is this why you always want to be my handler, _Soldat_?” Her child-like voice has returned, soft and soothing, not a trace of the scratchy and terse one he knows so well.

“You _want_ me to kill them, don’t you?”

She crushes the stammering trachea in between her two palms and slides the body off the bed with a loud _thunk_ of its massive weight.

“Oh, _Soldat_…” She breathes, hands trailing up her thighs seductively. Her shoulders wiggle up and down, chin dipped low over one as she looks to him eclipsed in the dark corner. “You’re so predictable.”

A flutter of eyelashes, a curled, red smirk. Her personalities are shuffling like a deck of cards as she slinks off the bed and over to him on all fours like a cat. Her hand starts low at his ankle and runs up his thigh, drawing a swirl at his hip. Teasingly, she places her palm over his neck— the same one just used to kill another.

It makes him growl and grow stiff in his pants. She giggles as she presses her knee against him.

“I used to think you were a God.” She croons, “Maybe you are. Gods are vengeful, after all.”

They’re nearly the same age now, and it takes his breath away to see her standing tall, those plump features faded away to reveal shapes elongated and sharp. His breakable girl fully grown into a fearsome woman. She nuzzles her nose into his collar, presses her cheek against him and purrs.

“Always wanted to fuck God.”

He wants to laugh, but she pushes her little fingers into his mouth instead, using her thumb to count his teeth, tongue trailing kitten licks over his bottom lip. She moans when she reaches thirty-two and then sobs at his symmetry.

It’s _perfect_.

She is fragmented and she is perfect.

The Soldier has flickered in and out for nearly ten years, watching her sprout wings just to have them torn off. But Hydra doesn’t know that she’s regenerating from their wipes, keeping her memories and mutating. Those sanctified Seraphim wings are lustrous black raven feathers now, dipped in tar and taking flight into the night sky, oiling the world in preparation for its fiery end. 

She doesn’t quite remember that they’ve done this many times before, but he doesn’t mind; he touches her all the same.

They fuck on the floor where the carpet digs into his back along with her nails as she scratches jagged ruby streaks into his arms. He sucks deep sapphire and amethyst bruises into her chest, bites her thighs, draws blood. They leave colors all over each other, hidden away by their advanced healing like gemstones inside the earth.

It’s furious and primal— heaven and hell encased between two broken bodies. They claw and snarl, wrestle and grunt, bite each other and lick the sting away.

He relents and lets her sit on top when she cuts his lip open, split down nearly to his chin. The chandelier swings overhead, casting its refractions over her back and around the room, snagging on the walls, on the floor, on the blue corpse in the corner.

Recognition passes over her face for a single, sweet moment when she looks down at him with something akin to tenderness. She reaches to her hips where he is holding on and peels him away, wiggling further down. A kiss is pressed to both his wrists before she pushes them over his head.

“They’ll kill you, baby.” She whispers, clamping her hand over his metal one. Her hips roll and buck as she eases forward, weight on his hands clenched tightly in hers. “They’ll kill you when they find out.”

He is the one who laughs this time as he meets her thrusts with his own, burrowing deep and hard. The thought of a true death roars inside his heart, the beckoning of everything he’s wanted for the past sixty years—the beckoning of nothing at all. He laughs and she joins in, two wailing spirits on the cusp of terrible relief.

He rises to kiss her, licks his blood into her mouth, drinks her breath down with his own as they both imagine the abyss coming to swallow them whole.

“Good.”

\--

Bucky is hard when he wakes up. He is hard and aching for it, tiptoeing out of the twin bed and into the bathroom where he runs the shower on _hellfire_ and burns himself inside the crucible. It feels like poison. It feels like arsenic in his veins as he thinks about her twisted angel face when she falls apart on his cock. Those enormous eyes turn so black they sink into her skull. That wine-colored mouth so wet it weeps garnet.

He doesn’t know why the room is so bright or why he can’t stop seeing her teeth behind his eyelids. He can count them now, too—all thirty-two, matching him and pearly like rosary beads. He could worship just her teeth, he thinks.

Bucky fists himself and pumps feverishly, eyes fluttering as he bites down on his cheek to stop the groans from waking Steve.

It feels like he fucked her yesterday. Two minutes ago. It feels like he’s fucking her now.

That ghost of his, running her lips up the length of his spine, tonguing the shell of his ear.

She’s behind him in the shower, reaching around to take him in her palm, pressing her tits against his back. He can feel her hand move between their bodies, sluiced up inside her own cunt.

_Always wanted to fuck God. That’s what you are, aren’t you?_

She stretches out the inside of his cheek with her fingers, makes him taste the sweet tang of her insides, and he swallows it along with the drip of bath water. She’s good. She’s always tasted so good.

Bucky shivers, even though his flesh blisters under the shower. She’s just like he remembered—boiling his blood with a mere pull of her lower lip between her teeth. The epitome of all his desires wrapped up in one rose-scented, doe-eyed package.

“Look at you, lover.”

She presses him against the tile, licking a trail from his chest to his mouth. Her tongue teases, hovers over his bottom lip without giving herself away. “You’re all shiny and new.”

She hums all the way down his torso, kissing a meandering path until she reaches his cock, throbbing red.

_Resurrected like my very own Jesus Christ. Shall I fly around your throne for you?_

She slides him into her mouth, pushes him all the way down like he could reach inside her stomach. His hand grips her hair, touches the jagged scars of her scalp and strokes them lovingly while he fucks her throat. Her eyes roll back when he comes, spilling creamy white down her throat that she eagerly takes like the eucharist. Her voice is hoarse, and she muffles her words against his thigh, but he can make out two infinite syllables churning: _Holy. Holy. Holy._

His fallen angel, Seraph. _Holy_.

His terrible love. _Holy._

His putrid, broken heart. _Holy_.

“Holy SHIT, BUCKY!”

Bucky’s eyes fly open, desperately trying to blink the spray of the shower away. It’s all a blur, her face, her mouth, her fingertips jammed into his leg. But it’s not her. She’s gone.

She’s gone and inside his fist is the greasy, wiry strands of Andrey Kuznetsov’s hair attached to his severed head and Bucky’s brain is struggling to catch up with the rest of it.

The screeching is back behind his eyes, chewing and digging, buzzing and spinning his entire world until he staggers and catches his shins on the edge of the tub.

Steve rushes forward, grabbing his elbow and, as gently as he can help a two-hundred-pound enhanced super soldier, sets Bucky down in the porcelain bath. The water was never running. Bucky is still clothed.

He looks around, perplexed by the state of the crimson room and his own doused pants and shirt. It’s all dripping, melting like an absurdist painting, sticky globs of bright cherry-juice _plunk, plunk, plunking_ on top of his head.

And speaking of head…

Bucky throws Andrey onto the floor with a hiss punctuated by a whimper. He doesn’t know where the rest of her old handler is, but the heavy-handed strokes on his forehead leak all the way into his pulled-out eyes. Bucky wants to laugh, he really does, because the fluttering in his stomach is begging to be released. And if he doesn’t laugh, he might vomit.

Steve fearfully follows the rolling route of Andrey across the tile until it hits the opposite wall with a dull _thunk_ and returns half a rotation backwards before settling on the stump of its neck. The ninth word glares at them vengefully. _Seraph._

\--

_Sometimes the world of the living gets mixed up with the world of the dead_ and his old ghost sits on his chest, holding his body down while his mind screams to be released.

Steve has wrapped Bucky up from head to toe with a spare comforter he strong-armed from the attendant in the lobby. He used his Captain America card, pointed his finger in her face until she called room service and even after that, he grilled the poor maid for new towels, trash bags, and bleach because someone was going to clean up all the blood and judging from Bucky’s catatonic state, it would be Steve.

He lets Bucky sit and nod off, keeping an eye on him the entire time while he mops up the trail Andrey’s head has created.

“Buck, you gotta tell me what’s going on.” Steve is firm but gentle, pulling the blanket tighter, turning the AC up to seventy-eight. It’s much too warm for two men whose metabolism runs so quickly, but Bucky is shivering head to toe like it is December indoors.

“I…. I loved her.”

It’s not what Steve expected to hear, but he’ll take what he can get, and he pushes the bewildered expression away. “Who, Buck?”

“S-Seraph. From back there. Sh-she… I don’t know. I’ve been seeing her.”

“Seeing her? At Karpov’s—was that who you were talking to?”

Bucky nods numbly, chews on his cheek because he can’t even feel it anymore.

“Was she here, Buck? Is that how— the head…? Was it her?”

Bucky shakes fearfully, hands slipping out of the heavy cream coat Steve has made for him as he cradles his own head in his palms. There’s no way it can be her. The last time he saw her was almost ten years ago and—well, and everything was ripped from them both.

“Steve…” Bucky whines, more pathetic than he’s ever sounded in his entire life, but there are ants crawling under his skin and the awful noise of pincers drumming a terrible liturgy. _Tlak-clak-tick-click-snk-snk-clk-clk. _“Steve--”

“Spit it out!” Behind Steve’s head is her face and Bucky drains completely of color, eyes wider than the moon as he stares.

“Fucking spit it out, baby! Tell him what you did!” Her hands are splayed to her sides as she tilts her head down to glare at him expectantly. She’s wearing that horrible ochre-stained hospital gown they shoved over her shoulders.

“Bucky? What is it?” Steve turns to see only back wall with its kitschy, lumpy floral wallpaper, poorly pressed on. “Bu—”

“Don’t look at him, look at me! Look at what you did, coward!”

She spins around, the back of the loosely tied fabric swinging open to reveal those dripping cuts, so deep he can see each separate layer of skin and tissue. It reaches down until the red splits open to reveal the ghastly white of her bones. Six slices. Six open, gaping, fissures. Six times they held her down and he said no, he wouldn’t kill her, and they were both made to pay for it.

“You motherfucker, _Soldat_!” She yells into the air, “And look at this shit!” Her right arm jerks to the side, halting in a sharp and sideways V, leading up to her fingers aimed like a gun at the back of her head. “You made me do it. You fucking _made me_.”

Those chewed off nails of hers are exacerbated and purple, torn from her cuticle all the way down to the first knuckle. They stare at him side by side, black-light neon signs pointing the way into the hole blown out of her skull.

The gown flaps again when she twirls in circles like a little girl showing off a new dress. She titters and giggles, flexing her toes and stands _en pointe_.

When she stills and raises her head, he watches the long line of her neck reach up from her collarbones. It rises like an acropolis column in ruins, blasted apart by cannon fire where the bullet went through her throat and back out in a crack of shattered bone.

He stares into her eyes, those dead lights still reaching him through the abyss, the speckled fading stars, two lifetimes away. Her pupils stretch apart until there is nothing but black.

All the stars have died and gone cold ages ago.

Bucky takes in a shuddering breath as she blinks along with Steve, both of them waiting patiently for a response.

If he says it out loud, it would make it true. If he says it out loud, then Steve would know that all those murders have been by his hand. He can’t remember anything but their faces, but he also couldn’t remember _her_ until two weeks ago so who’s to say what the truth is, anyway?

Bucky is seeing her now, though-- right in front of him, like she is flesh and blood again. She is watching and anticipating, fluid gushing down her back and soaking the carpet in oozing grey matter.

She takes a step forward, angling her chin until she’s barely a foot away from him, the polka-dotted gown brushing up against Steve’s arm. She holds up her hand, displays her withered and squashed grape-fingertips and he follows her lead, shaking as he reaches out to her.

Steve’s eyes copy the trail with unease, seeing nothing but Bucky.

Bucky links his fingers through hers, squeezes that soft girl flesh he has loved—_still_ loves. She closes around him and hums a tune, scratches the back of her neck absentmindedly as she sings, “Tell him, lover. Tell him what you know.”

Tears spill from his eyes, rushing down to hit his thighs and knees like waterfalls. He grips her hand tighter until he feels her brittle fishbones snap inside of his palm. He can’t let go of her again. He won’t. His heart could stop beating this very second and he would let it because he’d rather have that than not see her.

Bucky doesn’t look at Steve anymore. All he wants to do is look at her.

“Steve,” he whispers, grinding his teeth when his eyes sting too badly. He won’t even blink for fear that she’ll be gone when he opens them. His throat is stuck, glued shut with a million spider-egg-pills and their decomposing carapaces. He doesn’t want to say it. He doesn’t want to let her go.

A wretched cry rips from him, tearing through the silken snare, scattering the webs. Bucky’s world blurs as he sobs, “She’s dead, Steve. She’s dead.”

-


	2. Head Like A Hole

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A series of flashbacks of Seraph and the Soldier.

_Seven. Father. Tidal. Relic. Marrow. Four. Nineteen. Ghost._

Bucky is taken back to Steve’s apartment and quarantined to the confines of his room while Steve and Natasha figure out a way to fix his brain again. They sweep the findings of the mission under the rug, hide it in the basement and pray his tell-tale heart doesn’t give them all away.

It’s not like those corpses will be missed— not like they gave anything to the world but evil.

Steve hisses, _how did this fucking happen?_

The week before it started, Bucky was in California. Karpov’s body– when Steve burst through the door, the wire was in Bucky’s hand. But that was number seven and how the hell did Bucky kill five in between without Steve realizing it?

Natasha digs up the old skeletons, pulls her resources, and spins her webs, dragging out dead information and they spend the better part of the afternoon gleaning any kind of clue they can find.

-

It’s 2003 and ten years before she blows her brains out. They run together over the Minsk rooftops at midnight, jump the train cars, and he holds her elbow while she pitches over the side and snipes a hole into the cabin. Red splatters onto the glass window of the section door and they’re gone before anyone can scream.

In the alleyway, he pushes her up into the brick wall and shoves his hand under her thighs, gripping until his knuckles crack. “Now.” He commands, “Here.”

An annoyed exhale comes from her mouth before it’s replaced by the silence of her surrender. She always pretends to not want him; she likes that old game. “You want to fuck in an alleyway? Look a rat—you’re just a little romantic, aren’t you?”

“You want romance?” He asks, and her mouth curls into half a smile before she pushes it down. The faint streetlamp catches just a sliver. He loves that mouth. Wants to pry it open and crawl inside. It’s love. It’s something. “What kind of romance?”

She shrugs because she doesn’t know either— but all their time watching others, they know it has something to do with flowers and opening doors, tender gazes, holding hands, slipping away to kiss heatedly against a wall.

He can do only one. Happily, he presses her skull into the cinderblocks and bruises her with the force of him, teeth crushed against his lips.

“That’s it.” She laughs as she rolls her hips and licks his chin, “Have we done this before? Feels familiar.”

He growls, savors the shadow cast over their bodies bending in the alleyway.

“Feels good.”

—

It’s 2005 and eight years before she blows her brains out. London in the summer is rocked by three bombs and fifty-two deaths. In the destruction and fallout, they pick off two more and none are wiser to it.

—

2006\. Seven years, and they stop to stare at each other in the middle of padding through the rainforest.

Their handlers have caught on to the strange affinity their weapons feel for one another. Whispers have traveled about unclean wipes; the soldiers are returning from war and keeping their ghosts. Before, he would be given his triggers, manually reminded of her. Now, they wipe it all and nothing should surface.

But it does.

It does every time.

“Seraph.” He calls, watching a bead of sweat trickle down the side of her cheek. A smile grows on his face. She begins to match him, too.

Under the dappled light of the thick canopy, they fuck in the damp earth and listen to the wild chorus of rainforest birds. He thrusts into her desperately, each breath matching the snapping of his hips. His head is empty like a vacuum, all the blood and thought rushing into his dick.

“Is—this romantic—enough?”

She laughs, groans when he hits _just_ right, and her eyelids flutter.

“You’re getting close.”

—

2010\. Three years.

She’s bleeding out on the floor of the facility. He pretends like he can’t feel rage or pain or fear, but he feels them all and he forces himself to look away when his handler throws him into the chair.

Behind the frantically blurring room when the machine electrocutes his brain, he holds on to the image of her carried out and into surgery, branded with the faint pulse of her heartbeat growing smaller.

—

2013.

He is supposed to assassinate some fucking president or another but instead he marches into Bangui to find her among rebel forces throwing back alcohol by a campfire, rifle attached to her back, strapped in a vest made from bullets. Upon seeing him, she smiles something real—teeth, eyes flashing brighter than the flames.

That night, they fuck on a straw mat inside a mud room, thatched roof above them rustling in the wind.

“Thought you were fucking dead.” He grunts.

“Nope.” She’s amused at his concern, still smiling. “Can’t die.”

“You remember me.” He says it like a statement because he can’t bring himself to ask for fear of hearing an answer he doesn’t want to know.

After each revival they task him something new and while he thaws into a stranger world, he holds on to the secret comfort of her memory, thawing too until she is alive again inside him. So, when he asks— says, demands— if she remembers, he is hoping– goddamn it– praying, screaming for her to say yes.

She does. She kisses his eyes and mouth and comes hard on his cock.

It’s bliss. The big round O shape that burrows into her guts when she gasps. The frayed black strands of her fanned lashes, catching on the sweat of her lids. That squelch, both deep and hollow, echoing.

He plays it in his head the whole way back, secretly thrilled to have felt her again. Until the elation is ripped away at the sight of the facility. Gray and speckled green with mold. Her on her knees. This time, her gasps are croaking—O shaped mouth like a fish and not a lover.

A metal collar clasps the entirety of her neck and she can only look up because of its width.

She’s stripped naked. Before he can make any moves, his legs are kicked out and he falls in a crash and his kneecaps feel completely shattered. Or maybe that’s his heart because her face looks a little more than a bruise but the white of her teeth still shine through that rotten grape color.

“Th-they found out—I-guess— hah.”

A well-polished oxford splits the grape open and blood spurts from her … everything. The Soldier howls but five are by him and one has a trained pistol at her head.

“The two of you want to remember each other so fucking badly—shoot her and you can keep her memory.” His handler throws a pistol at his feet. It’s an offer, a threat, and a promise packaged up into one tiny chamber and a bullet.

She’s laughing because it’s too much for both their broken heads to comprehend.

Three pistols rotate and aim themselves at her head, one trained on his. Even if he could kill one, the other three would be immediate. Seven feet away, there’s a sardonic little smirk tilted on her face— the one he’s always enjoyed seeing.

_Let’s kill ourselves._ She would say on the edge of some skyscraper, _I jump, and you jump, and let’s be done. _The smirk would be playful, until it wouldn’t be. And then she would think about the statement and let the silence speak what he already knew. _But then I wouldn’t see you again._

The whistle of a blade cuts through the air and the first slash gouges into her back. She cries out in agony, pitching forward until they yank her by the neck and she’s up again, snarling. He can hear the blade tear through. The sound drops into his brain like insect wings rubbing over his eardrum.

“Shoot her.” His handler commands, cruel mouth in an impassive line. “Shoot her or I’ll do it again.”

It’s not even _him_ doing it, that miserable son of a bitch. He never gets his hands dirty— always using the fucking mercenary team.

“D-don’t be a coward, _Soldat_.” She gurgles, “Give them what they want.” When he doesn’t move because he _can’t – _he _won’t–_ they make good on the threat and the wings vibrate with the next cut. It’s sharp. It’s so sharp and her back eats the edge like soft butter.

She shrieks hoarsely, limp now, only suspended by the shackle on her neck and her arms, splayed out to the side. She looks like the way those statues of Jesus might if he was nailed to the cross on his knees.

“Don’t be cute.” The one wielding the knife pokes it back into her and the Soldier can think nothing. He hears nothing but that nightmare rubbing and skittering inside.

“S-stop.” He knows how helpless he sounds. “D-don’t.”

A flash of sympathy crosses his handler’s face and for a second it looks genuine until he takes a step back, grabs the knife himself and sinks it back in. “You’re weak.” He checks his watch, the alligator skin band slipping out from under his suit jacket, the silver rim of the face gleaming, like he’s being inconvenienced.

She hacks a wad of dark brown, shudders all over. “P-pickit-u-up.”

“Listen to her, Soldier. She’s got a good idea there. Always been pretty smart until … this.”

He scoffs an annoyed sputter and digs the point back into her just because he can. “Pick it up, Soldier.”

There are four cuts, four ways for her to bleed out. Her eyes are fluttering now, and she’s hanging forward, chest dipping low, arms stretched tight to her side. Any longer and her shoulder will dislocate. He’s frozen stuck. Welded into the concrete on his knees because no matter how many times he runs the simulation through— she dies.

The fifth and sixth cuts don’t seem to register, and she only gasps weakly when they let her drop on her front. The wounds have ripped her back open, diagonal and jagged cuts starting from her spine and striking outward, touching her shoulders, her hips, one straight. She is wearing red like a shirt.

“Like her wings?” That fucking merc. Standing behind her with his rifle against his shoulder, other hand on his pistol. “I get why you like her, Asset. She’s hot. Tight cunt.”

“How about this?” The handler claps, “Love… love is a beautiful thing. Fine. You’re in love. Great. Well, what else is beautiful, Rumlow?”

The pistol on her head loosens before a smile stretches over both their faces.

“Death. Fear. Betrayal, sir.”

“Right.”

His handler walks forward, places the bottom of his shiny oxford now a little decorated with red dollops like poppies in the night, and slides the gun between their bodies.

“I don’t care who shoots who. Whoever does it first obviously gets to live. I’ve got five minutes before my press meeting.”

The gun is already in her hands and The Soldier looks up, shocked. “You fucking coward, _Soldat_.”

Years pass between eyes. Twenty of them, regardless of how convoluted, how broken, how stunted. Glimpses. Flashes. Smoke vapors through their fingers in the vague fantastical shape of happiness. Stolen moments, always bringing them closer to this one.

It’s arrived. The pale rider, heralding the end times for them.

He scrambles to stand, to rush forward and knock it out of her hand because _damn her_. Damn her and how he loves her, but that bullet cracks and echoes, and silences him.

The hole through his flank weeps red and cries out for her from both sides like a single eye with the weight of all eight of their tear ducts.

“Isn’t this a romantic way to go?”

And he can’t believe those are the last words he’ll ever hear from her before she sends him one final grin and he’s a fucking coward because he can’t even look at her when she does it.

One.

More.

_Bang_.

And he feels like it’s ripped through his skull, too.

They drag him screaming into the chair and they’re already covering her body with a crinkled hospital gown. After that, there is nothing left but the bone-searing burn of the metal halo ripping it all away.

—

A knock echoes through Bucky’s room. In the darkness, he sits limbs crushed against his chest.

“Buck? Hey, we gotta talk.”

The door slips open, a sliver of light peeking inside to search for him. He squeezes his body smaller, sinks further into the mattress until he’s sure he’s inside the padding so that Steve can’t find him. But Steve does. He always does.

Steve reaches into the fabric and cotton and yanks him out by his chin. Fibers spew from Bucky’s mouth. There is a blue hand reaching into his throat and he chokes on the knuckles.

“Buck? Hey, we gotta talk.”

The door slips open and Steve’s head ducks inside.

Bucky watches in silent terror as she hovers over his bed, peering at Steve with her hand full of thread.

“Her real name, Buck. You remember it?”

Bucky is suddenly in the kitchen with Natasha to his side, calculating eyes piercing him like stiletto daggers. Seraph stands behind and fawns over the flaming red hair, leaning forward to smell Natasha’s scalp.

“What?”

“What’s the next one?”

He’s back in the shower, holding Andrey, who is crying black tears that roll down into the stump of his neck.

“The word, Bucky.”

Who the hell is Bucky?

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

She fists a handful of the plastic shower curtain, yanks it with all her might and the metal hooks shriek their way across the dowel where they clatter irately against the wall.

Bucky’s head is falling apart, just like Andrey.

“Barnes.” Natasha’s mouth is opening, but Seraph’s voice is coming from it. “Barnes.”

The mildewed tile background of the motel’s tiny bathroom blurs and vibrates until Natasha’s face is hardly more than a mess of streaks, like shampoo smeared over the backsplash tile.

He’s smeared there, too. Guts clear across and rearranged like some ritualistic sacrifice. He wants to die and be buried inside that hospital gown with her. He wants to cradle her face, kiss the wounds of her back shut, wrap the both of them up like joined embryos in the womb. He’d give his life for her, let her grow stronger and eat him, flatten his jelly-corpse against the amniotic sac.

He already feels consumed by her anyway.

“Rumlow.” Bucky chokes at the memory, “Pierce.”

The surgeon who took her too soon. The anesthesiologist who numbed him into forgetting.

“_Alexander_ Pierce?” Steve frowns. They’re both dead. Went down with Insight the same time Steve and Bucky did and how the hell did he miss this, too?

To his side, Natasha places her hand on his shoulder. “Pierce is dead.” She mutters. “Rumlow is not. Let’s go before I end up eating those words.”

—

The car ride is thrumming with unasked questions. Steve says nothing when Natasha kicks her feet up on the dashboard—there seems to be bigger problems on hand than a few scuffmarks on Tony’s car.

He’s not sure what they’re hoping to find. At least, a trace. At most, answers. He fucking prays that there won’t be a body, mutilated or not.

The Strike team was always a part of Pierce’s henchmen. Most of them are locked away, the rest dead. The dread had settled inside Steve when he realized that sure, he might have never been good with math, but he can count that there were eight bodies and Bucky has ten trigger words.

—

In the middle of Rumlow’s living room floor are two bodies. One is burned to a crisp, extinguished and charred over— indistinguishable as Rumlow other than the tags hanging from his neck. The smell of burnt skin stains the entire house, charred acrid flesh from the cadaver, a human shaped black scab.

Steve steps in a circle around the other lying face down.

He tries to take it in like a crime scene, detached and professional, because the body belongs to a girl and Steve can jump through all sorts of hoops to lie to himself about who it is—but he already knows. She’s dressed plainly in ripped jeans and a black t-shirt. There is nothing striking about her other than the fact that she’s limp in a pool of blood.

Her hair covers her face and fans over the hardwood floor. The slow pounding in his chest is signaling a darkening storm he can feel from decades away. There is no crackling in the sky to presage the downpour. No clap of thunder to warn those beneath. He feels caught in the moment where a tiny ray of light might slip through heavy and swollen clouds, allowing a small reprieve from gray before the flood. He knows there won’t be, though.

She is flooded. Rumlow Red. Like a paint swatch, rolled over her body and spilling from her hand. _Seraph_. The ninth word has dried on the ground.

Her skull is intact. Not like Bucky had said. A finger twitches and Steve thanks God he didn’t have to turn her over and check her pulse or perform CPR because whether or not he wants to admit it, Steve Rogers is afraid.

A groan whines out of her before her toes flex.

She rolls on her back, gingerly places a hand over her face and pulls the wet hair from her mouth.

“Seraph.” Steve whispers, “Is that you?”

She takes a quiet breath, blinks at her surroundings and the cherry syrup coating her head to toe. There is no fear, or surprise. No registering of the body beside her as she peers up into Steve’s eyes.

“Who the hell is Seraph?”

–

Leaves crunch beneath their feet as they make their way across the yard and into the building. Natasha is in front, leading. Steve lingers behind, watching. It seems like a terrible idea, bringing her here. She’s a bit nervous, watching both of them warily as she crosses the yard.

The car ride had been silent. Natasha had helped her wipe most of the blood off as Steve buried the body. They used rough paper towels and sink water, smearing the red away until her skin became flushed with the afterglow of pink. Then, Natasha asked her to change and burned her clothes.

“Where are we going?” A wince, quietly, as if she’s stepped on a splinter and then she’s back to normal. Whatever crossed her mind is gone. Steve is adding up the numbers but the equation is making absolutely no sense.

“How much do you remember about what happened?”

She shrugs and continues along, holding her arms close to her body in the November chill. “I don’t.”

“Nothing?”

“No.”

“What’s your name?”

“Sarah…” Then a pause as she searches Steve’s pale face and slowly says it again, inflection changing just a little. He hears it too, the puzzle piece sliding together as she says it the way it should be spelled, “Sera…?”

Her eyes are big and wondering, and she peeks at Natasha like a little fawn caught in the woods away from her mother. It’s curious to them that she’s been so compliant. Ever since the house with the burnt body and the smoky silence of the room where they were found, she’s dutifully followed along like a newly imprinted duckling.

Is this what Bucky was like?

Steve’s mouth twists into a fractured line, imagining the loss. He trots forward and yanks the door open inelegantly. His thoughts are fixed on the stagnant shadow of Bucky, sinking further into the gaping hole of his own mind.

None of the questions he has are being answered. There are cavities to be filled if he’s to find some peace of mind for any of them. Who the hell are you? Where have you been? Why aren’t you dead? Have you been killing? What do you remember? Why aren’t you afraid? Why aren’t you… _anything_?

He starts somewhere a little more concrete.

“Why were you there?”

“I’ve always lived there.”

Natasha whips around, eyes alert and searching. Steve can practically see the gears turning in her head as she flicks her gaze from Seraph to him.

“Wha-” He pauses, unsure how to word his next question. Natasha picks it up for him, deft and cool, letting the insinuation pass through her lips like an offhanded gesture.

“What was it like?”

She pauses slightly, trying to find a place to begin, but frowning each time. There is nothing there for her to compare it to, and Natasha gives Steve another quiet look. If all she could recall was Rumlow, then the world was Rumlow. Rumlow rules. Rumlow regulations. Rumlow punishments and Rumlow existence. It would have been normal for her, whatever it was.

Steve’s key slides into the lock. The tumblers clatter and they steel themselves to step into the living room.

Natasha points to a seat on the couch and leads the girl to sit. She settles in awkwardly before slowly looking up at them.

“What is it?” There’s an edge in Natasha’s voice, like she can already read the answer on her lips. Steve can, too. The dreadful knowledge of the kind of cruelty a man can inflict onto a woman– it makes his guts warp and knot inside.

Seraph tucks deeper into herself, pulling her legs up and holding her knees to her chest. Slowly, her hands find the edge of her shirt, raising it up over her chest. Natasha wasn’t there when she changed. She didn’t see it, then.

Her sternum is littered with pockmarks. Some have healed and look like old freckles the size of dimes. Others are still raised and puckered. Others, still, pink, red, bruising at their entrances. Their eyes trace the scattered injuries down to her abdomen where similar patterns leer back at them as if goading them to count. She looks like the moon, littered with silver lunar craters—shadows of a million impacts.

Seraph turns her head, pulls her hair away from her neck and shows them three more wounds. Old, hidden by patches of uneven hair.

“He liked to shoot me.”

–

In 1997 he finds her on the edge of the frozen lake. They’ve been holed up in an underground safehouse for the better part of the last week. The taiga stretches from the shores of the ice, running for hundreds of miles covered in thin snow. Blessedly, they haven’t been caught in any blizzards, but that doesn’t mean the cold gives them any pardon.

This morning is a balmy negative 5 degrees. Perfect for warming up outside, he thinks bitterly.

His boots crunch over the snow, making heavy indents in the layer of fluffed crystals and down into the petrified ground beneath. She doesn’t look at him, choosing instead to stare out into the ice, eyes following the crevasses of thick lines crisscrossing like tangled veins.

Her fingertips are bright pink as they play with a melting puddle inside her palm. The past week has been spent in silence with nothing but the whipping outside to keep them both from going completely insane in the metal cage.

They have both taken turns taking stock of the accompaniments of the hideout consisting of two laid-in and flattened cots and one single canteen to share between them that he needs to refill constantly. A million scratch marks on the wall, crumbly metal scattered about the floor and the inexplicable smell of something sour. There had been some powdered mix to sustain them for a couple of weeks; it tasted like sawdust and stale breadcrumbs.

Luxurious.

“Why are you out here?”

“Why are _you_ out here?”

Twenty-three and clinging onto the last thread of her childishness. Her mouth turns upward into a sneer that could be cutting if it wasn’t hiding a smile– proud of herself for the quip.

It’s been an entire week of this, and he closes his eyes at the thought of an unknown amount of days ahead. It’s silence. Then an insult. Then silence. Her dead eyes with a flicker. Her teeth plucking out another nail to spit on the floor next to his cot.

“Zola is gone. You know what we’re doing here, don’t you?”

She’s twenty-three and the bulletproof bell jar is shattering, its cracks matching the splintering inside the ice. Thick lines held together by some fortunate tension. He can watch it crumble and cut her entirely open, or he can pray that his hands will give her some mercy.

Yes, he knows what he’s doing here. He knows why they’ve been sent out into the middle of the frozen Siberian forest with no timeline.

He was told to take her into the hideout and _take_ her. Teach her. Make her learn how to wield herself like he’s always done as her instructor. Sear the practice so deep into her bones that she’ll recall it in any timeline. But he can’t yet.

He wordlessly marches back into the bunker, leaves the latch unbolted.

He can hear her heartbeat in the room.

Their bodies, infused with the serum, burn like furnaces. The outside wind may whisk it away, but in the tiny cage with just barely enough space for two, it is sweltering. He’s blown out the candle hours ago, resigning himself to lie in the dark and wait for sleep.

Her rustling limbs make his ears perk up. A soft landing of something hits his side. Then another.

He sits up, feels around blindly, soothes the beating in his chest. Her clothes are still hot from where her skin had been, and he moves them away, giving her the path to follow over to him. It has to begin now, before she loses her resolve and they’ll both be withering away for another week.

A shaky hand lands on his shoulder, unsteadily gripping him. Her breath comes out in shuddering waves.

Imagine that, Hydra’s number two, nothing more than a shy virgin inside a tin can.

His arm reaches forward and searches for her jaw. When he finds it, he holds her in place, sits up on his knees and leans forward until his mouth is flush over hers. She jerks away slightly against his grip before she gives in, letting him lead.

It’s clumsy and awkward, and her hands remain limp, one to her side and one still on his shoulder, like she’s still deciding what to do. He pulls it away, lets her believe in some comfort by placing them both in her lap. She doesn’t have to do anything yet and he needs to be delicate about the entire thing.

A small part of him remembers the fluttering feeling of her apprehension—way back when. An alleyway. His fingers. A dreamy shape of a face and fire-engine red lipstick. He remembers the fear mingled with the excitement. He remembers taking the lead even when he wasn’t sure and was scared stiff. A fleeting moment of sympathy strikes inside him.

“Open your mouth,” he commands, thumb brushing over the back of her head. “Just a little. Do what I do.”

It takes a moment, but she does, and he finds where she hides her venom— those words she sinks into him like blades— tucked inside a quivering and sweet cavern.

She mimics him clumsily, licking back in shy strokes of her tongue, sometimes too repressed, other times too eager. He presses forward in those moments, takes them where he can and grips the back of her neck firmly. “Stay here.” He moves backwards, feeling around before he lights the lamp by their cot. He grows more emboldened seeing her like this, eyes downcast at the sight of his searing gaze.

“You need to look. Learn, Seraph.”

He calls to her, placing both his hands over her own. “You hate this. But you need to find the good in it— either you do this, or you die.” She sneers and scoffs, twists her face into a puckered expression and the light casts large, jagged shadows over her cheeks.

“This, or torture. This, or they electrocute you so hard you piss yourself and they do it again. That’s before your organs explode and your blood gushes out of your ears and nose. Your brain, too. You won’t be proving a point to anybody and when the very marrow of your bones feels like hellfire. You’ll wish you had done _this._”

She clenches her fists, wraps her arm around her bare chest and glares into his face. “But I hate you.”

It makes him erupt in a genuine laugh. His student, his fragile doll turned into a serrated saw blade, still petulant like a little child. He reaches forward and tucks her hair behind her ear.

“You won’t always hate me.”

He wakes up before she does, that natural pull of his body’s internal clock not letting him ever sleep more than three or four hours at a time. She’s tucked into the fetal position by his side, curled underneath the blanket and nude, spine pressing up against his arm.

Upon his rousing, she comes alive as well and looks over, a strange softness rising inside her tired eyes. Slowly, her hand moves backwards and finds his knee in a silent offer. It’s all he needs. A smile before they return to last night’s events.

He promised to start slow, to ease her into it, but it can’t be all patience and kindness. He tells her men aren’t kind to them—not when they’ll be bought and sold like cattle. Men want to hurt, and they want her to be hurt. It’s about power; she can kill them, but they want to live with the fantasy that she’s nothing more than their plaything.

“Turn over. Lie on your belly.”

Still new and marveling at the novel idea of being touched, regardless of the situation and context—of being in a frozen wasteland and not in love, as she should be, he thinks—her body still keens for it.

He takes advantage of her reflexive yearning, caressing softly, feather light fingertips on the side of her neck, contours of her breasts, over the soft skin of her inner thighs. He traces silvery and stretched ridges of her skin— telltale signs of her body‘s changes. The marvels of a woman.

She’s soaked, leaking onto the flattened padding of the makeshift bed.

Last night was as tender as it could be, her tummy fluttering with nerves as he pressed his mouth down her hip and against the soft place between her legs. Silk rose petals blooming on his lips, sweet in the warm orange glow. There was gasping and a moan, noises she’d never made before.

_S-Soldat—s-stop, it f-feels–_

_It feels good, doesn‘t it?_ _Let it feel good._

Pride swelled in him as he pulled pleasure from her—that tender silhouette he once molded into what she is now. He’ll unmake her this time— unravel her until she is heat and fire, melt her entirely until she becomes his. She’ll know without a doubt that she is his.

“You’re hurting me.” She grunts into the pillow, quaking as he ruts inside. The softness has been replaced by hunger and power in one swift thrust.

“I have to, _malishka_. So you know what it’s like.”

“Fuck!” Her little fists clench, what’s left of her nails ripping holes into the stained fabric beneath her cheek, “Ah! A-ah… Oh!” He can tell when she feels the coil tightening again, squeezing his cock like a tourniquet. His hands slap the flesh of her ass. He grips her tightly and spreads her apart to watch the way he slides in and out, coated with slick and cream. She’s so fucking wet for it.

He pulls her up, opens her legs and thrusts back in, exposing her front to the air, holding her knees apart when she reflexively closes them. “Take it.” He commands into her ear, “Keep your legs open. Take all of it.” Then, he stills and lets himself settle inside to teach her a different lesson.

“Wh-what are you doing?” She squirms against his hips, grinding down to find some relief from the pressure mounting.

The Soldier presses his mouth to her neck and inhales that scent of crushed rose and sweat. “Beg for me. I want to hear you. Beg for me and I’ll let you have it.”

She’s delirious with pleasure and whimpers when he pinches and twists her nipples, spilling waterfalls of run-together pleads, “S-Stop it, Soldat. Stop!” Kitten whines when his fingertips rub the soreness he is stretching.

“Do you still hate me?” He allows her a slow drag and wraps his arms around her chest, “Do you?”

“No… I didn’t mean it.”

He smiles, because he already knew. Last night had changed her into something shattered and pliable only to his hands. Seven years and he’s come back to claim her as his own. There is sickness inside of him, burned into his cells that springs alive when she shudders and whines. There is tenderness, too. He wants to protect her, to crawl inside of her, to wring her dry of every sensation except for the one that keens for him. Make her hunger for him, too.

_Find the good, _he advised, but really, he should have said _find the smallest thing that you can half-want and take it, because you’ll never get what you really want._ Find the gilded needle in the blood-soaked haystack and bury it deep inside the cavity of your dirt-filled chest where no one will be able to dig it out.

He’s never had anything he wanted until now, and he’s waited so long and good for it.

His heart is like a grave, but it still beats.

The Soldier tugs on her hair and grips her throat. They’re bonded now, entwined as one single entity, hitched together by his throbbing cock inside her cunt.

“Seraph,” he whispers to the beat of a harsh up thrust, “Have they ever told you that you were made for me?”

–

_I have built cathedrals inside of you. Planted my knees on a bed of nails in supplication. I have worshiped every sinew and fiber of your being through both death and resurrection. There is a price to pay for returning, but I’ve paid it. I’ve paid it._

_Seven. Father. Tidal. Relic. Marrow. Four. Nineteen. Ghost. Seraph._

There is one left and the room is collapsing. Bucky stands like a statue by the hallway, in disbelief at the body before him.

The last word. He knows it in his soul. His head might be empty and full of spiders, gaping wide open like a black hole, but he knows it. The pull of her being drags him into the deafening silence of the abyss. The hand in the night. The claw on his ankle with its exacerbated fingertips is now fisting his hair, thrusting its raw ends into his mouth, painting memories onto his tongue.

Seven years I waited for you.

The father who left you—the Father who left us both.

The blood that rushed over us both like a tidal wave.

The memory of your youth—a relic to be gazed at in rosy nostalgia.

You and I inside the marrow of each other’s bones.

Four hands clasped, squeezing to test each other’s strength.

Nineteen ninety-seven when I slipped inside your body and made you mine.

You are my ghost and I am yours.

Seraph, Seraph, Seraph.

That blank face sinks into a sullen look, wide eyes closing for a moment of contemplation. The girl places her forehead into her fingers and rubs her temples. “My head hurts. Why does my head hurt?” She shakes something loose. “I know you. Who are you?”

She glares at him and his chest expands at the sight of her bratty features—eyebrows scrunched, flesh of her cheeks lightly gripped between her back teeth as she sticks her jaw out. Steve and Natasha are shocked into paralysis when their voices harmonize like choirboys during a canticle. There is a tempest swirling behind his eyes, all his blood rushing in whirlpool spirals in his ears.

They offer up her words, each one louder than the last.

_Seven. Father. Tidal. Relic. Marrow. Four. Nineteen._

“Buck!” Steve calls, but the storm is too overwhelming, and he can no longer recognize that name. “Bucky!” Steve is torn away into the background along with the building and everything else behind it.

When he calls _Ghost_, she shrieks joyfully, mouth wide open in an eager smile so large it could split her entire face. _Seraph._

She cries out. She is waiting. That last word is on the tip of his tongue, holding on by the finest of threads and his breath is stifled only for a second before he rips it all apart.

Bucky grins, a wet laugh bounding forth. His legs feel like jelly. His heart could burst. She’s back. She’s coming back and all he has to do is make it happen. She was _made_ for him.

Steve is jumping over the couch to get to him but he’s too slow. The final word tumbles out, huffed, puffed, blowing her walls down.

_Soldier_.

The Soldier.

She was made for _him_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be one more installment-- a quick epilogue. Hopefully this answered some of your questions. If not, sorry! It's just cr33py stuff. I am leaving most of it open to interpretation :) x x

**Author's Note:**

> Written for @moonstruckbucky‘s Halloween Haunts Challenge on Tumblr! There will be a second chapter :)  
Thanks for reading! Tell me what you think! I've never written something like this before!!


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